What IS Data Storytelling? | Brent Dykes Breaks Down the 3 Core Elements

And so I'm curious, how would you define kind of data storytelling as you feel like the term's often been hijacked? Everybody has a different opinion. We all hear the term storytelling. So when you're talking data storytelling, what does that mean?

Well, for me, I look at it as, there's three core elements. Obviously, a data story is going to be based on a foundation of data. So we've done some analysis, we've found some facts, we've got some data. And that's different than a story with data. Where I recently talked about that in a LinkedIn post where I drew that distinction between a data story, which is the foundation, it comes from an analysis, its foundation is in data, as opposed to a story with data where you may have a narrative that you've already come up with that you're trying to maybe tell people about a new product launch or some new features. And so then you're sprinkling in some, some data to kind of as evidence to reinforce why those new features are important or should be important to customers or prospects. So those are two different things. Now, other, the other two elements is obviously that the narrative is critical. With a data story, where we're forming, we're using the narrative structure, we're using different narrative elements to really engage the audience, make our, our content memorable and persuasive. And then often we use visuals to help tell that story. Because when people see a chart or data not in a table, it's often going to resonate more with them because they're going to be able to see the anomalies, they're going to see the patterns or the trends in those numbers and then speak to them at a much deeper level. So it's really, it's a combination of all three of those things, a foundation and then the, the visuals to then complement that and help to tell that.